Best pitch question

[jsljustin]

Hi,

am new to this software, but am enjoying it so far, I can see it has a lot of good potential for further enhancements.

My question is around the use of the "best pitch" feature.

Basically I have a monophonic piano line that is fairly simple, it just uses notes in each chord scale moving through approx. 5 chords. I have a small rectangle scaled small, and then have a translate module with the Y-value linked to the piano audio and the best pitch feature selected. It works well for a few notes but then seems to freak out when the piano note drops to a note in an octave lower, then after that it seems to lose its way.

Tried all the modifiers and nothing helps the note "tracking". If you are lost, I have this set-up to have the object (in this case just a test rectangle, quite small) move up and down vertically in line with the pitch of the note being played by the piano in the piano audio..

However, it doesn't seem to handle some of the notes very well. I could try and convert this audio to midi, then have that midi feed a pure sine tone, to see if that helps, but the piano recorded is fairly simple itself, and if "best pitch" is losing its way with this, then it isn't going to be useful very often. I read in the manual that the pitch scale is logarithmic. Is this possibly the reason for this issue?

Any suggestions? Would it be useful to allow users to specify logarithmic vs linear vs user-defined pitch scales?

P.S - a side request: I was hoping to be able to import midi files and use them in the same kind of way as audio - eg in this case importing a midi file and being able to use it similar to audio would give precise pitch, as midi can give precise pitch values. I know that midi is just data, but is it possible for a future software update to allow importing of midi files in similar fashion to audio? In my case it would help perhaps being able to feed the Y translations precise pitch midi data. Anyways...

If anyone has any ideas, that would be great.

And thanks for cool software. I had looked high and low for this sort of software in the past, and only just the other day discovered "Magic music visuals".

Thanks.
Justin

[jsljustin]

Just an update.

Had a look at the help tutorial "ScrollingPitchTracker" - pretty good example. Replaced the audio input with my piano input, and I could see quite a lot of spurious, or should I say harmonic notes being detected. So I created a midi file from the piano part (using melodyne editor) and then created a pure sine tone audio file. Unfortunately, same results. Spurious note detections a lot, even for a pure sine tone.

Another suggestion - maybe a feature whereby the magic user could adjust the sensitivity of the pitch detection? In a way that might get rid of the detection of harmonics / harmonic overtones?

Also, I've read a fair bit of the manual, and another question is - how to get objects / shapes or whatever is being drawn to disappear at times? I know about the alpha channel, or the premultiplied alpha, but what I was noticing with my rectangle example, with it moving on the Y axis according to pitch, is that in between notes, there was often a drawing of the rectangle in either its default starting position, or in-between positions when moving from Y to Y pitch positions.. what I wanted to do was to have the rectangle invisible except for say 70% of the duration of each note's pitch, instead of the rectangle "garbage" that was occurring a lot between note hits.. this isn't a criticism, just hoping there was a way of say setting the rectangle (in this case) to an opacity of 0% (invisible) for a duration following its being drawn at each pitch (Y value)..

Anyway, sorry if this is too much info.. and I apologize if this is answered elsewhere.. just been trying to learn this excellent software, and no better way then to try and create something I really wanted to create (object moving according to an audio file's pitch).

[Magic]

Hey Justin, unfortunately pitch detection is a somewhat tricky business. Our algorithm might not be the best for all instruments. It tends to work fairly well on a human voice, which is how we calibrated it. But let me look into it and see if I can make any parameters adjustable for other types of input.

If you want to try other algorithms, a Google search comes up with some good results for "audio to MIDI". I'm trying to remember the name of a good one I saw the other day but I'm drawing a blank right now... but I'll edit this post when I think of it.

We do have future plans to allow MIDI files to be loaded directly into the application. So it might solve the problem for you, but it will be down the road a bit.

As far as getting objects to disappear at low volumes, what you want to do is use a Gate modifier for any parameter that is linked to Volume. That way, when the Volume is less than a certain value (say 0.1), it gets set to 0. It's similar to a noise gate for audio. Let me know if it helps at all.

[jsljustin]

Hi Eric,

no that's brilliant, thank you! You solved one of my issues / questions with the gate modifier, thanks..

Yes, I understand the challenge with pitch detection, probably not like you, but I have a couple of real-time audio to midi trackers (one hardware and one software) and they both fail from time to time.. You actually appear to have done really well so far with your pitch tracking, I noticed that when I was converting my piano to midi using Celemony Melodyne, that the spurious notes I was getting with the piano using Magic were very very similar to what Melodyne outputted as well.. and Melodyne is considered quite advanced software..

I'm not sure of the internals of your pitch tracking algorithm, but my idea was perhaps a parameter like a cutoff / sensitivity or something, just to filter out (I guess) the partials / harmonics a bit.. But perhaps I could even try using a gate for this as well?

Anyway, thanks for your help, and I think your software is excellent! Congratulations. I remember searching for this type of "music to animation" software on and off for a few years and just the other day your website came up

[Magic]

Hey Justin, sorry for the delay.

I'm not sure of the internals of your pitch tracking algorithm, but my idea was perhaps a parameter like a cutoff / sensitivity or something, just to filter out (I guess) the partials / harmonics a bit.. But perhaps I could even try using a gate for this as well?

You can't use a gate unfortunately, because the specific thing you want to adjust is currently "inside" the algorithm. But I'll see what I can do about making it exposed to the end-user.

Anyway, thanks for your help, and I think your software is excellent! Congratulations. I remember searching for this type of "music to animation" software on and off for a few years and just the other day your website came up

No problem, thanks! I hope you continue to enjoy it.